Brands need a customer identity solution to drive strategic growth. It’s a competitive weapon. The customer relationships are a biggest asset that a brand has. They need to invest around identity and custom identity specifically to drive top and bottom-line impacts. The big question comes is where does identity sit? Do I need to invest in identity first? Do I need to invest in DMP first? But the question that we need to ask ourselves and also the customers, how important are the relationships with your customers? Are you thinking about driving mass reach in the way that you’re targeting groups of people, or do you truly want to get down to one-to-one? If it’s about one-to-one relationships, identity has to come first every single time.

The brands that we see that have really embraced this have been able to tie this back to some key metrics. One being average revenue per customer, two being NPS, net promoter score, three, customer lifetime value. Key, key metrics that we see in brands actually drive transformation to top and bottom-line growth. The result for a CMO of working with Signal, not just today but tomorrow and moving into the future, is long-standing relationships with customers. The customer lifetime value aspect of what they’re doing is the platform for strategic growth against the objectives that they’ve got and it’s a competitive weapon that they should be using all the time.

How important are your relationships with your customers? Are you mainly concerned about driving awareness through mass reach, or do you want to build deeper relationships with your customers by giving them more personalized experiences?

If you want to get down to one-to-one relationships, customer identity must come first every time.

You can likely cite plenty of reasons why you want to engage with your customers and give them better experiences. Here are our top three.

3 Reasons Customer Identity Has to Come First

1. Consumers don’t want to be treated all the same. Today’s always-on customers want to feel recognized and understood as individuals. They expect brands to use their customer data to provide experiences that are tailored, relevant and convenient. Generic messages and robotic conversations don’t cut it anymore.

2. Brands need to drive strategic growth. Customer relationships are one of a brand’s most valuable and unique assets. Brands that are able to build strong customer relationships have a powerful strategic weapon they can wield in the most competitive marketplace.

3. Marketers need to drive business results. Brands that have embraced customer identity are driving business transformation and reaping the benefits as measured by three key metrics: average revenue per customer, net promoter score and customer lifetime value. CMOs who work with Signal are building a platform for strategic growth, for long-term customer relationships and customer lifetime value — a competitive weapon they can use now and well into the future.

Neil Joyce

Neil leads Signal’s global sales and business development efforts. Based in Chicago, Joyce has 15 years of experience spanning the digital marketing ecosystem in Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. Neil has held key management positions at IBM, Acxiom and BrightEdge.

Related Posts

Note: A version of this post originally appeared in Forbes. Scott Galloway’s new book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, does a wonderful job articulating what makes each of these companies so uniquely successful. I’d suggest, however, that the key to their success can be located in their singular competitive advantage: customer data. …

Every day is Halloween for brands who can’t recognize their customers. Failing to identify customers across devices and channels is like failing to identify Halloween revelers obscured behind masks and makeup. If you don’t know who you’re engaging, you have no context for interaction, and the conversation inevitably takes a frightful turn. But every day …

We are all living in what Forrester Research famously proclaimed “The Age of the Customer.” But some brands are living better than others — for that matter, many are just barely hanging on. The Age of the Customer heralds a decisive, disruptive shift in the balance of marketplace power. Consumers now control relationships with brands, not …

Note: A version of this post originally appeared on The Future CMO Club website. Want to think less like a marketer and more like your customers? Put yourself in their shoes. One terrific way to know someone better is playing the Never Have I Ever Game. You’ll quickly find there are experiences that most all of …